Can business-planning experience transfer into building digital products?

It carries over more than you'd think, and the part that carries is the part that's hard to learn. Building a digital product is mostly two skills: deciding what's worth building, and executing it. Business planning and analysis trained you heavily on the first one — reading a situation, sizing whether something matters, structuring a problem, thinking about who it serves. The execution skill — the actual building — is real, but it's the more learnable half, and AI tools have lowered that barrier sharply. So you're not starting from zero. You're starting with the judgment half done and the execution half to pick up. The trap I'd warn you off: deciding you must first become an engineer. You don't. You become someone with strong product judgment who can now also ship. Build one small real thing end to end and you'll see your old skillset doing the heavy lifting — it just has a new output now.